It also effects buffs like Horn of Winter and Battle Shout. It won't be that bad of a nerf though. It's not meant to be a nerf, it's meant to be a change so that we stop favoring some items and enchants that use strength because druids aren't supposed to be strength users. Just like plate wearers aren't meant to be agility users. We'll get compensated.

As for the glove enchant thing, we get an agility boot enchant and cloak enchant. Strength doesn't have those. It all tends to even out.

Suhmon wrote: It won't be that bad of a nerf though. It's not meant to be a nerf(...)

It's still a 700-800+ dps nerf, I would not call this insignificant By the way, the WOTLK agility cloak enchant does not give us any dps edge over strength wearers since the 65crit enchant is just as strong. They would need to give us a 50 agility boot enchant to even the playing field.

Leafkiller wrote:It is only a nerf if the change is done in a vacuum. Look how late in the patch cycle for 4.1 the change to cat Swipe happened. You should not judge a patch before it has even hit the PTRs.

Leafkiller is right. Let's wait till they also reduce AP from agility as it's clear someone at Blizz has it in for druids.

I'm still waiting to see how 4.1 damage changes the logs but so far kitties are still near the bottom.

If you wait or not dosn't matter. It is a NERF to our DPS. If they buff bleeds 5000% it is still a NERF to our DPS. In the end the strength plus the bleeds would equale a buff but NERFing strength is a NERF. I am not saying this wont change or even go live but that one statement is a NERF.

Be sure to subscribe to The Fluid Druid RSS feed and follow me on twitter! @Sylvaneart

I am not upset by nerf to Horn/Strength of Earth. It is one of the reasons we scale so well at the start of a tier. Hell that like 800 extra AP no one else has at the time. The problem is it doesn't scale and we scale so badly that it becomes less and less effective.

What really disapoints me is how little choice we had this tier. For the most part this was a tier of 1's. 1 Bracer, 1 neck, 1 pair of boots, 1 staff, 1 agi ring. The only things that we had choices on were which tier offset we were going to choose, even those are really close together. This just further limits what we have to gear with. Now we have 1 glove enchant and they removed the viablity of using a strength 2 hander if Halfus was unkind to you. Every other class had additional options as main weapons. There was always a best one, but still there was more then once chance a week to get one.

Now because we know next to nothing about what gear is dropping for the new tier this may well change. But I have a feeling it won't. With only 7 bosses having choices for gear would inflate the loot tables so much that everyone would end up losing due to a much lower chance their gear would drop. Blizzard has stated that they want less complicated loot tables for this reason.

Now if we remove 2 bosses from this tier (Temple of the Fail) this tier 10 bosses big. With those 10 bosses you could find a piece of gear for every slot. The 4 Winds bosses sometimes had better gear but you couldn't depend on it. What that means is we have lost 3 bosses worth of loot that will either inflate the loot tables, or has to be paired down to help be fair to everyone (the right call here). I didn't count Sinestra in this figure because for every slot of gear she dropped it was covered by another boss, hers was just better.

To sum up I don't bemone the DPS loss, I am sure we are going to be reworked a bit and we have at least 2 months for them to announce what is getting changed. I am just saddened that gearing is less interesting now, and seems to become even less interesting as we progress further.

On this site and others people made the argument that raids should still take cats because of the utility we bring. In the 4.2 notes there was another nerf that impacted our utility. Innervate will now be useless when cast on anyone other then yourself. 5% vs 20%.

Goodmongo wrote:On this site and others people made the argument that raids should still take cats because of the utility we bring. In the 4.2 notes there was another nerf that impacted our utility. Innervate will now be useless when cast on anyone other then yourself. 5% vs 20%.

Not so MongoTree druid in my guild has 100K manaSylv has 20K mana

4.1 Inervate cast on tree = 4K mana for the tree4.2 inervate cast on the tree = 5K mana for the tree

It can be a buff. The new inervate will give the TARGET 5% of the TARGET's mana. Unless self cast then it is 20% of the casters mana.

Be sure to subscribe to The Fluid Druid RSS feed and follow me on twitter! @Sylvaneart

On the Innervate change, it also means that it will scale with gear and buffs (from a feral PoV). Currently it gives the target 20% of the casting Druids mana (YOUR mana), with the increase of Intellect on the next tier of gear this would still return the same amount of mana without the change. Feral obviously have zero intellect on our gear, so it will always return the same amount of mana to the target.

With the change in 4.2 your target's mana pool will be growing with each new item they get, while innervate will only return 5% of their mana pool the amount of mana it does return will go up.

As Sylvaneart heart said, even with current gear most healers have around 100k mana which would already be a larger mana return than a feral mana pool would give. As I pointed out, that 100k maximum mana will only increase with gear. It really is a buff, at first it may start out negligible, yet still better than its current form, but over time with better gear the return will be noticed.

It is however a pretty big nerf from the PoV of Moonkin and Resto Druids who innervate others. The power to innervate themselves remains unchanged.

BigTwoHorns wrote:Is that 5% of the Targets Target base mana or what is in the mana pool at the time of cast?

5% of their Maximum mana, the size of their total mana pool.

In reply to the Str to AP change, I expect we will see damage increases to all of our attacks to compensate for this change. As has been pointed out it effects more than just us wanting Str weapons (when an Agility weapon is being a PITA) to drop and Str enchants - It also reduces the power the Str and Agi buff (Horn of Winter, Battle Shout etc) and even Mark of the Wild, though to a lesser extent.

On this site and others people made the argument that raids should still take cats because of the utility we bring. In the 4.2 notes there was another nerf that impacted our utility. Innervate will now be useless when cast on anyone other then yourself. 5% vs 20%.

Yeah, it makes feral innervates better, not worse.

As I stated on my blog it's not a 700-800 DPS hit. It's maybe - maybe - a 700-800 AP hit, but 1 AP does not equal 1 DPS, not for ferals. And it's less if you're doing 10mans. It's really not that big a deal, and it is easily fixable by the time the patch drops - and it won't be dropping for another six weeks.

Yes, it's a nerf. But it's a small one and it's one that's good and needed. Anything that nerfs static buffs to ferals is a step in the right direction towards fixing a feral's scaling.

I disagree with categorizing the strength change as a "nerf" at this time.

From the urban dictionary, the definition of nerf is:

To make worse or weaken, usually in the context of weakening something in order to balance out a game.

If the strength change is not balanced out with another change to make our dps whole, then we can speak of the upcoming patch and this change as being a "nerf." But if it is tied to another change (or changes) that balances it out, and hopefully corrects some of our scaling issues - then it is not a "nerf." We won't know for awhile if the intention of this change is to "make worse or weaken" our class. It could just as easily be a building block to making our class stronger, in which case we might be calling this a "buff" by the time the dust (and patch) settles.

Do not assume intent so quickly - because to label something as a "nerf" assumes intent - the intent to make something weaker. As time passes we will discover what Blizz's intent with this change actually is.

Well let's all remember the original intent of the 2 AP from Str before we discuss it being a nerf or not, this was likely meant to help BEARS with taking the more traditional tanking jewelry without penalty (as we all know, there are no agil tanking jewelry). Granted, as Cata progressed it then became relatively moot in point, as base stats were far more powerful than say wotlk (and the lack of armor on the tanking jewelry made it all the easier to just grab regular agil dps jewelry to reforge weak stats into dodge anyways).

Now this of course does have the likely unintended nerf to kitty dps, as we got to double dip in effects like HoW; I'm going to guess this was never intended to be in the first place. Hopefully the devs will realize this and hopefully compensate us somewhere along the line. Then again I honestly am not freaking out, as my raid comp usually doesnt have a DK anyways lol, or shammy dropping the right totems since I'm usually the only melee, so it's kinda hard to miss what you never had anyways XD

shinryu wrote:Well let's all remember the original intent of the 2 AP from Str before we discuss it being a nerf or not, this was likely meant to help BEARS with taking the more traditional tanking jewelry without penalty (as we all know, there are no agil tanking jewelry).

In actuality, Strength was originally one of Ferals' primary stats and at least since BC has always granted 2AP per point. At that time Feral gear had both agility and strength on it and the alternative rogue gear with agility + AP was usually frowned upon because AP wasn't boosted by our talents (former SotF and another talent) and BoK. Also if I remember correctly Strength was Feral cats' #1 stat during early WOTLK until Savage Roar was changed from +30% AP to +30% physical damage.

It seems that some argue that it isn't a nerf because Blizz might make other changes. Well all we can deal in is the facts as they are known to all of us. And right now thee change to strength is a nerf. maybe, and it's a maybe only, things will be different in the future. All last summer I and others argued about the changes to ferals in Cata. Back then they were saying the exact same thing that the nerf will be balanced by Blizz. Only that time the balance never came. So it's a nerf right now and will stay a nerf till there is evidence to the contrary.

Goodmongo wrote:It seems that some argue that it isn't a nerf because Blizz might make other changes. Well all we can deal in is the facts as they are known to all of us. And right now thee change to strength is a nerf. maybe, and it's a maybe only, things will be different in the future. All last summer I and others argued about the changes to ferals in Cata. Back then they were saying the exact same thing that the nerf will be balanced by Blizz. Only that time the balance never came. So it's a nerf right now and will stay a nerf till there is evidence to the contrary.

Yes that is what i am saying. + even if the buff something else strength was nerfed. The class might get buffed over all but the strength change is a nerf. I am only talking about this 1 change and it is a Nerf.

Be sure to subscribe to The Fluid Druid RSS feed and follow me on twitter! @Sylvaneart

This change sounds bad. But on the other side i think blizzard should look at the kitty's scaling problem, i think something like bleeds affected by haste would make our dps much closer to top positions Too bad, they wouldn't do anything like that/

Yeah right now our scaling is bad, like I look at gear upgrades and I'm not excited because I know they won't change much. So you pretty much lose the materialistic incentive to doing raids and progressing, which of course is not what raiding's all about, but still... that's the core of an RPG.

The innervate change is a wash for us, if you are innervating anyone this expansion right now, you are wrong. We give enough Mana to cast a single healing spell, this won't really change with 4.2. You would be better served to use Tranquility at an opportune time because you are saving multiple healers mana. I've removed the stupid spell from my primary keybindings.

As it stands right now the Strength change is a nerf. We can talk about the future and them maybe compensating us but it wouldn't be the first time they added something early in a patch and we assumed it would either be changed, or we would be compensated for, just look at the changes to Shapeshifting. Did we eventually get some of it back? Yes, but it took a whole new patch for them to reverse what anyone with a brain knew was a terrible idea. So until we actually SEE compensation, it is a nerf to our overall DPS.

For cats the 2p is kinda...unexciting. It's about a 2% DPS boost given that shred is about 20% of our overall damage. For bears it's okay as well, though it really should be put on thrash, not maul.

The 4p is confusing but could be somewhat insane depending on the increased length on berserk. I don't think it'll make FB worth doing just to up the berserk length, but it's possible in some situations it will. It's going to be hard to model, that's for sure

The bear 4p is decent if not exciting. 10% more dodge every minute for 12 seconds is 2% more avoidance overall. I'd prefer a bigger avoidance boost tied to something that isn't already a defensive CD (like making enrage a defensive CD like in our T10) but this is fine.